Kennedy School Review

BY JENNIFER HELFRICH I am an environmentalist. Friends call me a “tree hugger.” Tree huggers are a rare breed here at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). My fellow students each have their public policy area of focus—and the environment is not one of them. I understand the dilemma; HKS students tend to exhaust themselves through […]

BY PAOLO FRESIA I am an impact investor. I believe that deploying capital more responsibly is necessary to redirect global capitalism toward greater social and environmental sustainability. However, I am not naïve. Impact investing is no silver bullet, and—alone—will never be sufficient to solve the world’s direst problems. My classmate Matt Tyler recently wrote in […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG The Trump Administration recently retracted its promise to label China as a currency manipulator—and rightly so. While there was merit to such a claim ten or twenty years ago, labeling China a currency manipulator in 2017 simply misses the mark. In its semiannual foreign exchange report presented to the Congress on April […]

BY IVAN RAHMAN Having worked as a teacher and school leader, I attended Harvard’s 2017 Social Enterprise Conference (SECON) with the hope of discovering solutions to some of education’s most pressing problems. Instead, the conference raised a series of thought-provoking questions about education. Does innovation in public education preserve, or even exacerbate, the status quo […]

BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY “I think I’m going to start with Fred.” I nodded. “That makes sense.” Fred was Nathan’s brain tumor. Fred was also a tried and true opener. It was a little weird, grabbed your attention, and then gave you a bridge into the real story about Nathan’s health insurance. Nathan even described Fred […]

BY ANDY VO At a campus like Harvard, it can be hard to find a conservative millennial. I initially reached out to Steven to discuss what it was like being just 23 years old and already a Masters student at HKS on a fellowship through the Air Force Academy. We met at Algiers Café, and […]

By Katherine Mansted Will the rise of intelligent machines spell doom for humanity? Popular movies and news reporting on artificial intelligence (AI) would certainly have us think so. In Hollywood’s imaginings, AI is dangerous and uncontrollable. AI seduces: recall Ex Machina’s calculating femmebot. AI murders: think of the homicidal HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space […]

BY YAHYA CHAUDHRY Last week, capping off a successful awards season, Mahershala Ali won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Moonlight — the first time a Muslim has won in an acting category. Ali portrayed Juan, a Cuban-born drug dealer living in Miami who becomes a surrogate father to a bullied […]

BY THOMAS KARL E. HOCKS Yes, Angela Merkel may lose power this year. No, it won’t be like Brexit or the United States presidential election. After the recent turmoil around Brexit and the administration of President Trump, eyes are on the French presidential elections in the spring and the German federal election in the fall. […]

BY NATALIE GOODNOW AND BOBBIE RAGSDALE Today is International Women’s Day, a fitting time to discuss a topic at the forefront of the news over the last several months: abortion and women’s rights. Though abortion has been legal for decades, the issue is still a contentious one in the public sphere. Unfortunately, many people today […]

BY JESSICA SCHAUER LIEBERMAN On February 25th, the Democratic National Committee chose Thomas Perez, former Secretary of Labor and Harvard Kennedy School alum, as its new chair. The media billed the election that resulted in Mr. Perez’s victory as a battle for the party’s soul — a clash between its leftist and establishment wings. The […]

BY MATT TYLER I thought impact investing was central to curing social ills. Government was secondary, in my mind. I was wrong. Over the last 18 months, working with governments in the United States and Australia, I have focused on how to improve social outcomes for the most vulnerable. As a graduate student at the […]